Belfast City Council has passed an SDLP motion calling for Stormont to review Airbnb short-term lets.
Councillors want more regulation and a cap in certain areas to deal with the impact of the website, which includes reduced housing supply, raised rents and general disruption to residential neighbourhoods.
There are 1,200 active listings in Belfast, Bangor and Holywood, with 70 per cent available as “entire homes”, rather than the original Airbnb premise of rooms let out by ‘hosts’ in their own homes. This is comparable to the amount of social housing built in Belfast in a year and four times the number of homes listed for normal private rent in the city on Propertynews.com.
It is also the equivalent of a dozen large hotels. In addition to its well known problem of denying people homes to rent or buy, Airbnb denies productive investors - as opposed to speculators - the chance to build proper short-stay accommodation in suitable locations and create thousands of jobs. The company’s claim it sustains jobs by bringing in more tourists is short-term thinking.
Airbnb was growing by 60 per cent annually in Belfast before the pandemic, with every sign the trend has resumed. There are 3,600 active listings across Northern Ireland, almost double the number three years ago, 80 per cent of them entire homes. That equals the total housing stock of Magherafelt.
The SDLP motion calls for a cross-departmental review and presumes new powers and legislation, which will obviously take years, assuming Stormont delivers anything. Fortunately, there is no need to sit about in the meantime. Airbnb’s business model is barely workable for most hosts if existing regulations are fully enforced.
Thanks to Stormont’s sluggishness, short-term lets must comply with the 1992 law governing all tourism accommodation, which has not been updated in a decade. In effect, every Airbnb host must meet the full requirements of a guest house if renting out a room, or self-catering accommodation if renting out an entire property. There is an exhaustive checklist covering everything from building control to regular cleaning. Structural alterations will often be necessary for fire safety and disabled access.
The first step to compliance is applying for a £40 licence from the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, currently branded Tourism NI. Its quality and standards officers must inspect the property, sign it off, re-inspect it every four years and make further unannounced inspections. Operating without a licence is an offence punishable by a £2,500 fine or six months’ imprisonment.
Tourism NI appears swamped by the growth of Airbnb. In its last annual report, covering 2017, the tourist body congratulated itself on handling 369 licence applications from all sources in a 10-month period.
The following year it brought its first two prosecutions over unlicensed Airbnbs but dropped both when the hosts applied for licences. This approach has since become policy. Tourism NI says: “If it’s brought to our attention that someone is operating without certification we will contact them, advise them of the legal requirement and ask them to register. In almost every case the property will comply.”
That looks like a truce, with inspectors waiting for a neighbour to complain before acting. So how many complaints can they handle? How much compliance is enforced beyond the application process?
Tourism NI is an independent agency under the DUP-controlled Department for the Economy. Its job is to facilitate accommodation, not discourage it, but a crackdown on standards is well within its remit. Other departments, agencies and councils have further relevant responsibilities. Planning permission may be required to change a building’s use from residential to commercial. Letting a room out can turn a house into a House of Multiple Occupancy, with associated regulatory obligations.
Hosts must usually register a business and pay business taxes and rates. Mortgage lenders must be notified and nearly all will require switching to a more expensive buy-to-let type product. Short-term letting and subletting are against the leasehold terms on most apartments and some private developments.
Details on any property’s leaseholder, freeholder and mortgage lender are publicly available from Land and Property Services for £5.
The difficulty of meeting regulations has led to the emergence of specialist companies who look after Airbnb properties, much as estate agents will manage properties for conventional landlords. This protects hosts from complaints, yet could also simplify complaining against multiple hosts.
There is clearly huge scope for communities, housing campaigners and political representatives to press the system to the limit. They might even hurry Stormont into producing solutions of its own.
